Medications for administration to patients in medical facilities are often prepared in sterile facilities, such as intravenous (IV) medication rooms, in advance of administration to patients. Medical technicians often prepare the medications for administration based on instructions specified by a pharmacist or doctor responsible for preparation of the medication. In this regard, medical technicians may fill a syringe by transferring medication from a medicine vial to the syringe within a laminar hood. The filled syringe may either be delivered to medical personnel for injection into the patient or may be injected into an IV bag or IV line for administration to the patient intravenously. Sometimes, medical technicians are instructed to prepare IV bags by injecting multiple medications extracted from multiple medication vials into the IV bags in the sterile environment. The volume and type of each medication transferred into a syringe and/or injected into the IV bag may be specified in the instructions provided to the medical technician. In some instances, an order in which the medications are injected into the IV bag is critical and specified in the instructions.
As it is important to verify the prepared medications prior to actual administration to ensure that the patient receives the appropriate medications and volumes thereof, the preparation process is often verified by a pharmacist or other responsible medical personnel. However, due to sanitation concerns, logistical concerns, time concerns, and/or the like, it is often impractical to have a pharmacist directly observe or personally perform the preparation of syringes and IV bags. Accordingly, the process is frequently documented so that the pharmacist can verify the prepared syringes and IV bags prior to their administration to a patient.
Existing techniques for monitoring and documenting fluid transfer history are often tedious and may be extremely time consuming to implement. For example, photographic documentation of the process requires taking a photograph of each step of a process (e.g., a photograph showing a syringe pulled back to a specific volume while inserted into a specific medicine vial and then a photograph showing the same syringe inserted into a specific IV bag) and requires the technician to position each physical object so that the photograph captures a label or other identifying feature of the physical object to enable the pharmacist to verify the process. Thus photographic documentation may be quite time consuming and may further be unreliable if necessary identifying information is not fully captured in the documenting photographs.
In another existing technique known as the “pull-back method,” a technician may prepare an IV mixture and pull all of the empty syringes back to reflect the volume of fluid that was injected into the IV bag using each respective syringe. The technician may then place the empty syringe(s) next to the vial(s) that were used to create the IV mixture so that the pharmacist may verify the contents of the IV bag. However, the pull-back method does not directly check contents or volumes during the preparation process, but rather the check is performed after preparing the IV mixture and introduces additional possibility of error, as the technician must attempt to recreate the injected volumes by pulling back the empty syringe(s) to reflect the volume(s) injected into the IV bag. Accordingly, the volumes provided for pharmacist verification may not be the actual volumes injected into the IV bag.
Accordingly, it would be advantageous to provide methods, apparatuses, and computer program products for more efficiently monitoring a transfer of fluid between a syringe and a fluid reservoir, such as a medication vial or IV bag.